Apple officially attending NAB for first time in a decade

Apple will be taking part in NAB 2021, attending the broadcasting-centric show for the first time after a decade-long absence.

The NAB Show, by the National Association of Broadcasters, is a trade show that aims itself towards media production. For 2021's show, set to occur from October 9 to October 13 in Las Vegas, Apple will be making an appearance among the major vendors taking part in proceedings.

An update to the NAB Show website spotted by Applescoop shows Apple in a list of organizations attending in 2021, alongside Disney, ABC, CBS, Dreamworks, ESPN, Fox, Hulu, IHeartMedia, NBC, and Netflix, among others. The headline attendees also include many that aren't strictly broadcasters or in the streaming industry, such as Facebook, the Department of Defense, the Dallas Cowboys, the LAPD, Jaguar Landrover, and Epic Games.

The tradeshow is intended as a way for companies to show off tools and services that they can provide to broadcasters and media producers, including areas infrastructure, production, and editing. Apple has many products that can fit into those categories, and is also a broadcaster in its own right via Apple TV+.

Apple was previously a regular attendee of NAB, but has been noticeably absent for ten years. In its last appearance, Apple used the FCP User Group SuperMeet in April 2011 to unveil the 64-bit Final Cut Pro X, which it would release later that year in June.

21 Comments

Ecky-Thump 66 comments · 8 Years

About 3 years ago

Apple Silicon Mac Pro release?

mcdave 1927 comments · 19 Years

Interesting lineup of non-broadcast-affiliated companies. What will Epic agenda be pushing?

mpantone 2245 comments · 18 Years

Ecky-Thump said:

Apple Silicon Mac Pro release?

The likelihood of this is zero percent.

Apple does not announce new hardware at other people's events. They only announce new hardware at their own events.

Besides, Apple said that the Apple Silicon transition would take two years. We are less than fourteen months since Apple unveiled Apple Silicon at WWDC in June 2020.

The most plausible scenario would have them upgrading the Mac Pro the last, thus next year -- probably after MacOS 16 (whatever it will be called) ships in autumn 2022. This would also give Mac Hardware Engineering more time to improve ASi architecture for HEDT/workstation class performance.

Next up should be a higher-end iMac, the 16" MacBook Pro, and refinements to all of the Macs that are currently on the M1 SoC. Again this would be done at one of Apple's exclusive events, not anywhere that they would have to share the limelight with someone else. This is a no brainer.

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

I guess Apple TV+ is not the abject failure it is declared to be by the local techie wannabes here who solemnly don’t subscribe to it and regale us with tales of how bad it is and how it will collapse when the free trials expire... hmmmm. I know, a run on sentence that Grammarly would not like.

tht 5594 comments · 23 Years

Well, maybe this is good news regarding hardware. If the Apple Silicon MBP14/16, higher option Mac mini, and maybe a large iMac are announced in the September iPhone event, this means they will have hardware NAB folks would like.

If the Apple Silicon in these machines have ProRes FPGA hardware built-in, definitely something they would like to show off a lot. Would be cool if they had auto-clustering software, where rendering, compiling, processes could be distributed across multiple machines in a plug and play manner. No futzing around with software configuration.